Birds in my Garden

-
We set up a bird feeding station within a week of moving into our wee bungalow. We quickly got the attention of the neighborhood coal tits and a wood pigeon, but they were our only visitors. As the temperatures have dropped in the face of autumn, the number and variety of birds has increased. We now have coal tits, blue tits, great tits, wrens, house sparrows, tree sparrows, blackbirds, robins, and pigeons (both wood pigeons and your urban rats with wings). We even had a goldfinch drop by a couple of times!

I haven't been able to get a photo of the goldfinch, but I did manage to grab pics of some of the others. I still haven't got the hang of the DSLR, so some of the photos aren't as sharp as I'd like. One of these days . . .

This robin is a daily visitor to the seed tray. 

The blue tits enjoy the peanuts.

One of the many coal tits who come by several times a day to eat.

I think this is a house sparrow.


I think the fellow on the right is a male tree sparrow. The one on the left is a female.

A better view of the female tree sparrow.

I noticed a spot of autumn colors on the hill across the way, so I zoomed in for this shot.

Like I said, the blue tits really like the peanuts.

It's no supermoon. I took this about a week earlier. We were blanketed in heavy clouds the night of November's supermoon. By the time they cleared, it just looked like a regular moon. 


A male blackbird taking a bath in a puddle just outside our gate.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Time to drop the curtain

-
When my Mom passed away in March 2018, my zest for this blog fell dramatically. She was my biggest fan and enjoyed combing through the photos I'd post. But I tried to continue on because my Aunt Jody also enjoyed the blog. Well, she passed away early last year. It's time to call it for this blog. The hubby and I moved to Ireland late last year and I have ideas for an ex-pat in Ireland blog. When we were considering the move, I found little current blogs on the subject. I'm thinking maybe I can fill a gap. But Back and Forth Across the Pond is done now. It was fun and I hope you enjoyed it. Hail and well met. Deanne
Read more

Inverewe Gardens

-
Image
We stopped at Inverewe Gardens on our way home at the recommendation of one of Steve's work mates. It's a property within The National Trust for Scotland, so admission is free to Trust members. We had been pondering joining since we first moved here and decided to just bite the bullet and sign up whilst we were at the gardens. We only have to visit about four more places to have the membership pay for itself. Since the Culloden Battlefield near us in Inverness is part of the Trust, and our membership also grants us access to England's National Trust locations, we figure our membership will end up saving us quite a bit within the year. Inverewe Gardens was once the estate of Osgood Mackenzie. He built his mansion house on a rocky promontory overlooking Loch Ewe in the mid-19th century. He dreamed of having a walled garden of flowers and vegetables and set about excavating a raised beach and building retaining walls and terraces. By 1870, Osgood had created a productive gar...
Read more

Bus, Wall, Pavement, and Park: A Wander Around York

-
Image
The heatwave finally came to an end on our final day in York. It was offered much appreciated relief. We had afternoon tea scheduled in the mid-afternoon, so we broke our day. The morning included an open-top bus tour and a wander along the city's medieval wall; and the afternoon included a stroll through a surprisingly expansive park. We bought a ticket for one of the ubiquitous Hop On-Hop Off bus tours. Pretty much every major city has one of these. Heck, Inverness has one! The ticket is good for 24 hours, so you can actually use the bus as transport if you want. That had been our original intention, but we ended up just doing the hour-long tour and that was the end of it. But we enjoyed it. And I saw bits of York I had never seen before. And learned some interesting tidbits. The tour was broadcast in English, but if you had headphones you could select other languages. Like Kids English  and Yorkshire. When the "bus" part of the day was o...
Read more